Getting It Through My Thick Skull

by Mary Jo Buttafuoco

  The hospital workup was very thorough. I, of course, had a more complicated medical history than most. Every conceivable test was run on me, which took quite a few hours. Every single item I had brought was examined. Nail polish, perfume, hair spray, mouthwash—they were all confiscated. As the day wore on, I became increasingly antsy. The effects of the pills wore off and the dreaded anxious, sweaty feeling of panic came over me. I needed another dose. I certainly wasn’t going to get one there. I grew weaker and more nauseous as the day wore on, and my blood pressure eventually dropped to a dangerously low level. The doctors gave me some sort of medicine—not nearly enough for my tolerance level—but the immediate physiological problem was addressed.

  The five or six days that followed were sheer hell. All I wanted to do was roll into a ball in bed. I had uncontrollable shakes and vomited constantly. When I wasn’t throwing up, my mouth was so dry I could barely swallow, let alone eat. I woke up each morning drenched in sweat, the sheets soaking wet, which the staff had anticipated. I’d been given extra sheets on my first day, and the first order of business each morning at 6:00 AM was for me to remake my bed. I was barely able to stand up, but rules were rules. The program was the same for everybody, though I did not want to follow it. “I just need to get this stuff out of my body. I don’t need to do all this other crap. I want to get out of here and go home. I don’t belong here!” I kept telling anyone who’d listen.

  “Oh, no, you definitely need this program. Stick it out,” the counselors told me. I dragged myself to the main office and literally begged the head counselors to excuse me from group meetings. “Please, I can’t do these meetings. I don’t want to get into why I’m here and have everybody staring at me because of who I am. I’m here because Amy Fisher shot me in the head and I take too many pills!”

  They had heard it all many times before and didn’t care. “You’re going to go to every meeting along with everybody else.” Every day we followed a strict schedule, with several group meetings that, sick as a dog, I was compelled to attend. “Come on, come on, you’re not dying here,” the counselor would say. No, it only felt like I was. I hated every minute. They might force me to sit there, but I wasn’t about to say anything. The first week I was so miserable that I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to. I sat, and sweat, and listened, and mainly thought about how much I hated being there. I didn’t know if anyone recognized me, and if they did I was too out of it to care. Many of the other group members were equally shaky. My identity was the last thing anyone cared about as they detoxed. The staff knew who I was, of course, but they were accustomed to public figures as patients.

  Somewhere around a week or ten days into the program, I simply gave up the fight and surrendered to the process. It was relentless. The program took up every waking minute, and I couldn’t escape. Accepting the reality that I needed to be there came easier once I could actually eat, keep food down, and the cold sweats stopped as the last of the drugs drained from my system. After six or seven days, I was clean for the first time since I’d been shot. Tired, shaky, and weak, but completely drug-free. I stopped begrudging the early wake-up, the endless chores, and the round of meetings, where I listened to some truly horrifying stories of loss from other women. The ones who had lost their children due to drug and alcohol abuse particularly moved me. The fact that every life had problems, many much worse than mine, was made very clear to me several times a day. After a completely silent couple of weeks, where I simply shook my head when it was my turn to speak, all my resistance vanished one afternoon when I felt compelled to finally talk.

  We were in another endless meeting about getting to the roots of addiction—why we drank or abused drugs—when all my years of pent-up anger exploded. I had been living with it for so long that it was simply a part of me. Even I was amazed at the depths of my rage as it spilled out. “I hate that bitch Amy Fisher . . . it’s all her fault!” I screamed. “I was minding my own business, and she destroyed my entire life. She ruined my health, she ruined my husband’s life—he had to go to jail because of her lies!—and she ruined my children’s lives, too!”

  This gave us all something to talk about for quite a while. After letting me rant until I was exhausted—me, me, me and all that had been done so unfairly to me—the counselor spoke up. “Well, what do you want to do about this? You have every right to be angry, but do you want to spend the rest of your life feeling like this, living like this, not wanting to get out of bed every day and blunting your anger with pills instead of dealing with those feelings?”

  Well, this was something to consider. Over the next two weeks, I worked through many complicated layers of rage that I’d held so closely for so long. Everything I was so angry about—the loss of my whole life—I relived, sober. It was very painful. At one point, I was assigned an exercise to write a letter to Amy—one that would never be mailed—telling her exactly how I felt. For hours, I sat, stone-cold sober, and reconsidered the chaos of the past six years. As I wrote down how I felt, everything poured out of me in a letter filled with vitriol.

  My counselor read the letter. At the end, she said, “All right. Do you want to continue to carry this anger, or are you willing to learn some tools to help you manage this anger and live with what’s happened, and get on with the rest of your life? You’re only in your forties, with a lot of years to live ahead of you. How are you going to live them?” I really didn’t want to live this way anymore. I was miserable and had been for years. At an outdoor group ceremony that evening, all the patients took turns dropping their letters into a campfire. As each turned to ash, we all cheered for its writer. The literal burning away of years of resentment, regrets, and pain symbolized the idea that this was to be our new beginning.

  Through the many workshops and programs that followed, I learned—slowly and painfully—to let certain feelings go. I had to learn acceptance of things I could not change, a very hard lesson for me. In addition to my rage at Amy, I had plenty of leftover anger about the fact that I had never been given my due as the victim of a violent crime. The media had turned it into The Joey and Amy Show, the police and prosecutors hadn’t helped, and the whole experience had left me deeply scarred and resentful. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t change or fix any of it. It was scary. If I let go of my anger, what was I going to do with myself ? The wheels started to turn. A tremendous shift began. I was letting go.

  I had to mourn for everything that I had lost without the buffering of any pills. For days, I was grief-stricken as I relived all my losses and faced all these feelings raw. There was nowhere to go and no pill to pop to make it all blurry. It was as big an awakening for me as the day I opened my eyes to see the lights and the nurse hovering over me in the hospital.

  I walked out of the Betty Ford Center with a gold “one day at a time” medallion in my hand, a clear head, and a better attitude than I’d had in years. I was detoxed but knew I had plenty of work still to do. It wasn’t easy to let go of the anger that had been barely contained for so many years, but I was calm and determined. “What happened, happened; this is your life now. What are you going to do with it now that you’re free?” The counselors’ words rang in my ears.

  I returned home to my little rented house in Los Angeles and faced life sober. It was a tremendous relief to be free of the pill habit. I never even considered abusing them again. The pain in my head, particularly problems with my right ear, was always present, but manageable. I looked better, felt better, and had a new attitude.

  I continued to work on my anger issues by reciting mantras to myself and practicing calming breathing exercises when I felt the old anger start to flare up. I lived the 12-step philosophy the best I could. I continued to read all kinds of books on forgiveness and became very clear on what I was doing here: forgiving, not condoning. Amy’s act was never going to be comprehensible or excusable in any way, but for my own peace of mind I had to free myself of the hatred I felt for her. From now on, I had to concentrate o
n looking ahead and dealing with the life I had—not the one I missed. I was working my program, as they say in recovery circles.

  Joe and Paul were busy with work at the new auto body shop. Jessica was in school, with friends, or playing sports, and everything seemed to be working itself out. I was working through my grief and feeling lighter every day, as if a huge burden was slowly lifting—one I hadn’t consciously realized I was carrying. I started to really consider me again, not what had been done to me, but the active, social person I’d been before the shooting. I knew I’d never be the same woman again, but I was certainly capable of making some kind of contribution or difference to someone beyond my immediate family. I believed again that I was worth something.

  My first step was to get busy; I needed to find something to do to fill my time. No more lying around a darkened bedroom all day. I saw a notice seeking volunteers to record books on tape for the blind, so I signed up for the program. It was a baby step, something to get me out of the house each day, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the work. Each day when I showed up, I was given whatever needed to be recorded that day, ranging from college textbooks on astronomy, to Harlequin romances, to serious biographies. I learned how to master the huge reel-to-reel machines and conduct a recording session on my own. Sitting in the booth with the headphones on, I’d get lost in another world. And I certainly learned about some things I’d never have known otherwise. When I left each session, I took some satisfaction from the realization that I had done something good and productive, no matter how small, that might brighten someone’s day a bit, or even help educate them.

  Less than four months after my return home, I got a phone call one afternoon out of the blue from Dominic Barbara informing me that Roseanne Fisher, Amy Fisher’s mother, had hired a new attorney named Bruce Barket. My stomach clenched. I wasn’t sure what was coming next.

  “Roseanne Fisher would like to meet with you personally. Would you be willing to come out here and do that?”

  I would never pass up a trip home. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t even think about it, especially when I learned it wouldn’t be on my dime. I had no particular desire or curiosity to meet Amy’s mother, but I jumped at any chance to go home. Joe couldn’t have been more supportive. “I think you should go. It’s a great idea. It will be good for you. Go ahead.”

  “Are you sure, Joe?”

  “Absolutely. It’s closure, and you need it. Go!” he said. He could not have been more encouraging.

  I felt perfectly confident going into that meeting with Roseanne at Dominic’s office on Long Island. In fact, I felt a bit self-righteous. Hey, my kids don’t run around shooting people in the head was my mean-spirited thought. I recollected the one time I’d seen Roseanne face-to-face, during Amy’s original sentencing, and I had given her and Mr. Fisher the most evil glare I could manage. I hated them. They had clearly fallen down on the job. Seven years later, with my own teenagers, I felt more forgiving, but still a bit smug.

  I arrived first, and when Roseanne came into the room, she walked over to me and held out her hand. I extended myself and gave her a hug. Seeing her really jolted me. We were the exact same age, only a few months apart, but she looked like an old, worn-out woman. She was painfully thin. I could feel all the bones in her shoulder and back when I hugged her. For the first time, I thought about how devastating this had been for her. She was a mother, after all, and now I had an eighteen-year-old with his own problems. They were nothing like Amy’s, of course, but I definitely had a new perspective.

  I suddenly remembered going to visit Joe in jail, the long, humiliating wait in line, the dehumanizing search, the horrible institutional setting. I pictured this small, defeated woman going to visit her only child for seven years, week after week, hours away in upstate New York. I was flooded with pity. For the first time I looked at her with empathy. We sat down, and I soon found myself trying to put Roseanne at ease because she was so nervous and so sorry. She apologized over and over. “What made Amy like this?” I asked, honestly trying to understand what had gone so wrong.

  She didn’t know, but the stories she told me that day went a long way toward explaining at least some of Amy’s behavior. Roseanne had been a shy eighteen-year-old girl with strict Italian parents fresh off the boat. When she started dating Mr. Fisher—a divorced Jewish man almost twenty years her senior— they told her in the strongest possible terms to find someone else because they did not approve. She defied her parents’ wishes and married him anyway. Amy was born a year later.

  In a trembling voice, Roseanne described how Mr. Fisher had been verbally and physically abusive toward both of them. At some point I had to interrupt and say, “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “I tried,” she said almost inaudibly. “When Amy was two, I went back home, and my parents said to me, ‘You made your bed, you lie in it. You did this; you’re not coming back here. This is not our problem.’” With nowhere to go, she went back to her house and abusive husband. Her stories were heartrending. Most of me felt nothing but pity. Still, the angry, judgmental part of my mind asked, How could you let your kid grow up in that environment? The Fishers had divorced shortly after Amy went to prison, but it was too late for their daughter. Still, who was I to say or judge her behavior?

  The visit went well, I thought. We hugged again when we parted. I had no desire to see Roseanne again or to be her friend, but I felt good about the whole situation. It was refreshing to be healed enough to open my mind and think more about other people, how badly they’d been affected, and what they were going through. In my hurt and anger, I hadn’t spared a thought for Amy or her mother. Now I had to face how badly other families were hurting as well, how many people’s lives were forever changed.

  Several days after I returned home, a letter from Roseanne arrived in the mail. She thanked me for seeing her and told me I was a wonderful person, a saint, how great I was, and so on. It was very sweet. A week passed, and a call came in from Bruce Barket. “I have a letter for you,” he said. “It’s a letter from Amy. She’s very sorry about what happened, and she has written you to apologize. May I send it to you?”

  “I’ve been waiting seven years for this,” I said in surprise. “I’ve been waiting seven years for that girl to say she’s sorry.”

  “Well, she has written you this letter, and I hope you’ll read it . . . so can I send it?”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. “I’m interested to hear what she has to say.” I was stunned and curious. I had never imagined this day would come. A few days later, a long handwritten letter arrived in the mail. Amy’s letter was quite vague, as she was in prison and not allowed to refer to many things or use certain words. But the language was heartfelt, and she clearly apologized. The whole incident was her fault. Joe had had nothing to do with it. She had many issues she was working on that she’d tell me about someday, and she was very, very sorry. She had always wanted to say she was sorry, she wrote, but had been advised by former counsel not to reach out to me.

  It has taken a long time to realize exactly how serious what I did was and what factors in my life led me to it. I don’t have the benefit of professional help in prison for a variety of reasons, but my mom helps me a lot. She said she met you and you weren’t what she expected. Mom told me you were a nice, kind person. I’ve always tried to think you were mean and horrible because it was easier for me to deal with what I did to you. When my mom was talking about you I became filled with emotions that I had never felt before. I wanted to meet you and tell you in person how bad I feel for everything that has happened. I’m not sure if you’ll ever believe that I’m sorry for what I did to you, but I am. I had a lot of anger inside of me and I directed it at you. That anger wasn’t for you and I know now that what I did to you is the worst thing one human being can do to another.

  Tears ran down my face. At last—a seemingly sincere apology from the person who had harmed me. She was finally taking responsibility for the devastation she had wr
ought on so many lives.Thank you. Thank you for owning up to this and apologizing at last.

  Shortly after receiving the letter, Bruce Barket filed a brief seeking a new trial for Amy on the grounds that her personal relationship with her counsel Eric Naiburg constituted a conflict of interest, which had interfered with his ability to properly represent her. Amy claimed in her brief that while she was out on bail, they had kissed, touched, and acted out his sexual fantasies. Dozens of poems, notes, and letters Eric had written to Amy over the years were attached as proof. They were certainly damning.

  My old nemesis, Assistant District Attorney Fred Klein, officially notified me that based on overwhelming evidence of Eric Naiburg’s misconduct, they were granting Amy Fisher a new trial. The DA’s office planned to negotiate some sort of settlement rather than go through the time and expense of an entire trial. I had been forced to let go of my desire to have my day in court years before. Once again, all kinds of deals were being made behind the scenes. However, I was consulted, and this time I was able to participate in the process without rage or painkillers clouding my judgment.

  Their new proposal was this: to reduce the original sentence of five to fifteen years to three to twelve years. With seven years’ time already served, there was an excellent chance she would get out on parole.

  I reacted to this news with very mixed feelings. “What do you think, Joey?” I asked.

  “Whatever you decide,” Joey answered. “Whatever you think best, I’m behind you. If you want to accept this sentence reduction, good for you. Whatever it takes for closure.”

  I flew back to New York for a behind-closed-doors meeting with the district attorney’s office. I reconciled myself to the idea of Amy being let out of prison, but I wanted certain stipulations to go along with her probation. If she was going to be let out, her four-year probation wasn’t going to be a picnic. She would have a curfew of 8:00 PM, drug testing, and be prohibited from going to bars and nightclubs. She would have to get a job and live with her mother. I really thought that she would be unable to live with these terms. She would mess up fast once she was let out. How do you tell a twenty-five-year-old who’s been locked up for seven years—or any person at any age who’s been locked up for years, for that matter—not to go out at night?